> I've yet to see anyone who doesn't believe that stupidity exists and it's the other side of the same coin.
I do not think that is the argument though. Clearly, there is some sort of distribution of all human attributes. I think the argument is in how (in)accurately something as qualitative and arbitrary as intelligence can be measured.
I like the analogy of athleticism. Some people are more athletic than others, but again, such differences are generally highly contextual. I am sure some sort of test composed of factors like the number of push-ups, sit-ups, and time trial of a 100m dash could be used to generate some sort of AQ (athletic quotient).
However, scoring high on the 100m dash might positively correlate with performance in sports, but I would not wager that a high AQ is truly indicative of athletic performance as a whole. At least not in any transitive sense when mapped to many sports. For example, Usain Bolt might have a very high AQ because of his running ability, but his AQ might not serve him well in a game of ice hockey or swimming.
Sure, but in the case of a hypothetical AQ, we could do factor analysis and pull out different things, like the strength of various muscles or muscle groups, like all pure running tests had strong correlation with things like leg muscles. In IQ, this has famously been done and found that a single factor dominates.
Or when they saw that knowledge of arcane sport rules interfered, they could look for a more pure test of ability rather than knowledge, which they did with IQ by going from tests of specific factual knowledge to Raven's progressive matrices.
And when you do that kind of work, you find that you can develop better measures that have a lot of predictive power for whole populations, even if they do not tell you, say, how many goals they'll score in their next hockey game.
I do not think that is the argument though. Clearly, there is some sort of distribution of all human attributes. I think the argument is in how (in)accurately something as qualitative and arbitrary as intelligence can be measured.
I like the analogy of athleticism. Some people are more athletic than others, but again, such differences are generally highly contextual. I am sure some sort of test composed of factors like the number of push-ups, sit-ups, and time trial of a 100m dash could be used to generate some sort of AQ (athletic quotient).
However, scoring high on the 100m dash might positively correlate with performance in sports, but I would not wager that a high AQ is truly indicative of athletic performance as a whole. At least not in any transitive sense when mapped to many sports. For example, Usain Bolt might have a very high AQ because of his running ability, but his AQ might not serve him well in a game of ice hockey or swimming.